From a distance, Claudia Castro has it all: a famous family, a trust fund, thousands of Instagram followers, and a spot in NYU’s freshman class. But look closer, and things are messier: her parents are separating, she’s just been humiliated by a sleazy documentary, and her sister is about to have a baby with a man she barely knows.

Claudia starts the school year resolved to find a path toward something positive, maybe even meaningful – and then one drunken night everything changes. Reeling, her memory hazy, Claudia cuts herself off from her family, seeking solace in a new friendship. But when the rest of school comes back from spring break, Claudia is missing.

Suddenly, the whole city is trying to piece together the hours of that terrible night.

From the critically acclaimed author of Invisible City and Conviction, The Missing Hours is a novel about obsession, privilege, and the explosive consequences of one violent act.

Review:

Intricate, dark, and disturbing!

The Missing Hours is a provocative, compelling thriller that takes us into the life of Claudia Castro, an NYU freshman who, after waking up one morning beaten and raw with no recollection of the night before, heads out on a mission of vengeance and justice after she receives a video depicting the harrowing event that clearly identifies the two men who assaulted her.

The writing is tight and intense. The characters are scarred, self-obsessed, and impulsive. And the plot, including all the sub-plots, builds nicely to create tension and suspense as it unravels all the violent actions, manipulative personalities, despicable behaviours, and parasitic relationships within it.

The Missing Hours is ultimately a novel about consent, violation, obsession, overindulgence, scandal, revenge, corruption, deception, social status, and rape, and even though it had me a little more riveted in the first half of the novel than the second, it is still overall a taut, gritty, compelling thriller by Dahl.

This novel is available now.

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